Books like Distributed Blackness — picked by fans

I’m cheating a bit here because this one isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories by Argentina’s greatest writer.

Beautifully translated, it shows Borges at the height of his powers. I also got a sense throughout of the extraordinary range of his intellect – he certainly liked to show off.

Among my favourite stories are "The Garden of Forking Paths," which anticipates the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, "The Lottery of Babylon," a meditation on luck, "Three Versions of Judas," which comes to a shocking conclusion about who Judas was and why he betrayed Jesus, and "The Immortal," which shows us what a curse immortality would be. And I thought his description of a dream in Ragnarok was spot on.

This isn’t a book about biology, but it makes the list anyway. Genes, chemistry, and mechanics stretch our conception of life. Still, there’s more needed to make sense of it all: the emerging understanding that dynamic interactions, feedback loops, and a bit of randomness make life alive. We need more books that lay this out; this was one of my motivations for writing my book.

Philip Ball’s very recent How Life Works seems masterful, and I’m sure it would make this list if I were writing a month or two later, after I’ve finished reading it. But since I can’t list either my book or his, I’ll list Gleick’s book, one of the best popular science books ever. It dives into the science of order and chaos, from the turbulence of Jupiter’s red spot to the unpredictability of weather, with a bit of biological pattern formation in the mix.

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Full disclosure: Laura DeNardis is a good friend and former colleague of mine. But I was a fan before I was a friend, and thus far, The Internet In Everything is her crowning achievement, so I feel very comfortable listing it here as an absolute must-read.

When Laura told me she was going to write this book, my first thought was, “I wish I’d thought of that!” and my second thought, a nanosecond later, was, “Thank goodness I didn’t because she’ll do it a million times better.”

DeNardis is the reigning monarch of Internet Governance Studies, meaning she researches all the weird laws, policies, technologies, businesses, agencies, and practices that have built the internet and keep it ticking. You’d think the subject would be boring or impenetrable to us mere mortals, but her genius is in making it not only understandable but downright fascinating.

She understands the internet the way… show more.

I’ve always been a big fan of books that explode the “great man” myth and lift the curtains to show all of the unsung heroes behind history’s greatest accomplishments. The sociologist Howard Becker’s classic Art Worlds did this for creative professions, and Kathy Kleiman’s Proving Ground does the same thing for digital computers.

The birth of modern computing is usually credited to the mathematician Alan Turing. But the actual work of programming the world’s first general purpose digital computer, named ENIAC, was undertaken by six remarkable women mathematicians (Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Elizabeth Snyder, Frances Bilas Spence, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum) whose names were left out of the history books.

Author Kathy Kleiman has made it her life’s work to restore these trailblazers to their rightful place at the beginning of the data revolution that has radically changed global society over the past 80 years.… show more.

I have read dozens of books on a variety of free speech topics–everything from political dissent to hate speech to pornography. But I have never found a single book on the entire history of free speech over the ages of Western civilization.

I love the way that this work portrayed the most significant free speech struggles from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Enlightenment, and beyond to today’s social media controversies. More often than not, histories are boring and pedantic, but this history kept me involved and interested right up to the last page.  

Written long before J.D. Vance made single women an open political target, Anthea Taylor’s book propounds skepticism in regard to the frequent cliche that they are now a privileged and celebrated class.   

In fact, as she shows, this truism is part of the cultural construction of single women as a problematic population subject to evolving modes of cultural criticism and denigration. This book astutely analyzes their depiction in “chick lit,” reality tv, blogs and self-help modes. It’s smart and scholarly as well as highly readable.

So many books on negotiation and communication basically say, “Imitate me!” And then, if the author’s advice doesn’t work for you, you must be the problem. Damali’s book and approach are the ones I wish I had existed when I was at Harvard Law School and in the years after when I was teaching well-regarded negotiation frameworks but feeling like something was missing.

Reading Damali’s observation that what makes you different might just become your superpower was the “finally!” moment I’d been waiting for. Instead of telling you to be more like someone else, Damali models and lays out a way for you to be most effective—by being yourself. 

This book shares insights and short vignettes that really bring home the power of words and it always leaves me inspired to see and treat others with greater respect. I also appreciate that it goes beyond just pointing out the many problems that can exist in our communication with others, but provides some ideas for how to communicate in ways that can help us, and others, heal from words that have done damage to our sense of self. 

This book changed my life as a scholar who champions change in how we teach reading.

Susman brilliantly charts the path for anyone who wants to open minds, move hearts, and change the world in any movement or endeavor. She chronicles her own career journey which led her to be the renowned head of corporate affairs at Pfizer during the pandemic and beyond and leaves the reader with a path to follow in their own campaigns for change based on compassion and common sense.

The most valuable and practical part of the book is their “mapping your immunity to change” process.

This process asks people to understand the things that they do, how they do the things that they do, and how the way they think can keep people from actually being able to change.

The book moves from an individual level to how organizations talk, and how people and organizations talk together. It changes how people can work together.